Northwestern Debate Institute1
2011 File Title
***CASE***
Colonization Advantage
No overpopulation now- empty land and food surplus
McNeil 08 [Donald G McNeil, Professor of Economics, “Malthus Redux: Is Doomsday Upon Us, Again?”, 6/15/08]
The whole world has never come close to outpacing its ability to produce food. Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" But much of it is being fed to cattle, the SUV's of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world's wealthy. Theoretically, there is enough acreage already planted to keep the planet fed forever, because 10 billion humans is roughly where the United Nations predicts that the world population will plateau in 2060. But success depends on portion control; in the late 1980s, Brown University's World Hunger Program calculated that the world then could sustain 5.5 billion vegetarians, 3.7 billion South Americans or 2.8 billion North Americans, who ate more animal protein than South Americans. Even if fertility rates rose again, many agronomists think the world could easily support 20 billion to 30 billion people. Anyone who has ever flown across the United States can see how that's possible: there's a lot of empty land down there. The world's entire population, with 1,000 square feet of living space each, could fit into Texas. Pile people atop each other like Manhattanites, and they get even more elbow room. Water? When it hits $150 a barrel, it will be worth building pipes from the melting polar icecaps, or desalinating the sea as the Saudis do. The same potential is even more obvious flying around the globe. The slums of Mumbai are vast; but so are the empty arable spaces of Rajasthan. Africa, a huge continent with a mere 770 million people on it, looks practically empty from above. South of the Sahara, the land is rich; south of the Zambezi, the climate is temperate. But it is farmed mostly by people using hoes.
Colonization won’t occur in this millennium at best
Kistler 98 [Walter P.– founder of Kistler Aerospace Corporation, “Humanity’s Future In Space”, July 21, 1998]
4. The Very Long-Range Future of Humanity in Space Will humans ever visit other stars and colonize planets in deep space that offer conditions similar to those on Earth-temperate climate, oceans and continents, an atmosphere similar to ours? Only one in a thousand planetary bodies is likely to meet all those conditions. Since the star closest to Earth lies at a distance of over 4 light years, the right planet circling the right sun at the right distance will hardly be found at a distance of less than 10, 20 or 50 light years from our Sun. The farthest stars in our own galaxy lie at distances of nearly 100,000 light years from us. How will humans ever be able to traverse such distances within their lifetimes? They probably won't! The first travelers to distant stars will not be people, but robotic probes, moving at much less than the speed of light and requiring centuries to investigate distant solar systems. Only after exploratory work is done and we know the nature of our near galactic surroundings can humanity afford to venture further into the cosmos. The only conceivable way this can happen is through means of human colonies living in large space islands similar to those suggested by Jerry O'Neal of Princeton University. There is no way we could imagine those large objects, weighing millions of tons, being able to move with anywhere near the speed of light and so, unless people are put in a stage of suspended animation, many generations will come and go before the "promised land" has been reached. The spread of humanity throughout our galactic system will be a very, very slow process, not to be expected in the next century, but perhaps in the next millennium. However, when we look at the millions of years it took us to evolve in our development, humanity will have plenty of time to progress towards our destiny.
Earth Is Sustainable
Earth is sustainable, and it’s impossible to economically transport a significant number of people without trading off with the resources that enable sustainability
Elhefnawy 9 [Nader - Professor of English at the University of Miami, writer on IR published in journals including International Security, Astropolitics, and Survival, February 2, 2009, “Planetary demographics and space colonization,” online:
The idea that population growth will drive space expansion is an old one. In 1758, the Danish Reverend Otto Diederich Lutken made reference to the settlement of human beings on other planets as a way to alleviate population pressure in his article, “An enquiry into the proposition that the number of the people is the happiness of the realm, or the greater the number of subjects, the more flourishing the state.” It was also much on the mind of Nikolai Fedorov in his development of his important ideas about space travel. The population explosion of the 20th century and the increased concern about the planet’s ecological limitations have kept these concerns alive and well, figuring prominently in visions like Gerard K. O’Neill’s 1976 book The High Frontier, and a great deal of space opera.Today the world is still seeing large-scale migrations, but it seemshighly unlikely that they will translate into a “push” off-planet,even were the technology to become available in this century as O’Neill (and many others) have predicted. An important reason is that the affluent, technologically advanced states that are most capable of conducting the effort seemleast likely to generate space colonists, given their tendency to receive rather than export immigrants in recent decades. This pattern is reinforced by the fact that their populations are aging, and appear to be either stabilizing or gradually declining—not the demographic picture usually associated with such dramatic expansion.This may suggest that the rich industrialized countries will be the main providers of the money and technology for the enterprise, while the fast-growing developing nations provide a disproportionate share of the colonists, but the facts of the situation are more complex. (O’Neill, certainly, was concerned by the need to redress Third World poverty when he wrote The High Frontier.)However, even assuming that the cooperation necessary to make this highly unequal arrangement work is somehow achieved, the fact remains that most developing states are actually well along the demographic path already taken by the industrialized nations. The pundits who dismiss Europe’s future on demographic grounds, while celebrating (or dreading) the rise of China, tend to overlook the reality that Europe and China are in the same boat with regard to family sizes. The Total Fertility Rate (TFR)> for the People’s Republic of China is actually 1.77 births per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1, and slightly below Norway’s. (The trend is even more marked among the “overseas” Chinese: the four countries with the lowest TFRs in the world being Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore and Taiwan, respectively.) While countries like the Philippines have higher fertility rates, a similar drop is already evident in several other developing East Asian countries (Burma, Thailand, Vietnam), as well as industrialized Korea and Japan.The same trends are evident in the Middle East as well, contrary to what some sectors of the media proclaim. In Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon and Iran, in fact, birth rates have already fallen below replacement level, with fundamentalist Iran’s 1.7 children per woman below the levels of Finland, Denmark, Luxembourg and France.The trends are less advanced in southern Asia, but still evident there too, with India’s TFR at 2.8 and Bangladesh’s at 3.0. Pakistan’s is 3.6, relatively high, but also representing a sustained drop from nearly twice that in the early 1960s, and likely to fall to 2.3 by 2025 according to a United Nations study. (In the same time frame, India’s birth rate is likely to fall to replacement levels, or very close to them.)The situation is similar in the Western hemisphere, and not only in the United States and Canada. While fertility remains relatively high in Central America (Guatemala’s TFR is 3.6 births per woman), these countries still represent a relatively small share of the population of the region as a whole. In populous Brazil, by contrast, births have fallen to fewer than two per woman, and the same goes for Uruguay, with Argentina not far behind. Cuba’s TFR is among the lowest in the world at 1.6. Even in Mexico, the source of so much consternation in the United States, the figure is under 2.4 and dropping.In short, very high fertility rates have become a thing of the past outside sub-Saharan Africa, and even there the likelihood is that development will mean this changes here as well. Of course, that leaves the possibility of population growth from the other end of the telescope: greater longevity, but the prospects for this also seem to have been exaggerated. For American women, life expectancy improved from 47 years in 1900, to 71 years in 1950—a 50 percent increase in that half-century. From 1950 to 2000, this was extended by another eight to ten years, a much more modest 10–15 percent growth in the same length of time. (The profile of male life expectancy in the US followed a similar course.)This is a broad slowdown in the extension of the human life span, despite the skyrocketing cost of health care. Accordingly, just going by the established trends, life is unlikely to get very much longer in the foreseeable future. Indeed, there are signs that this progress is being reversed, with smoking and obesity commonly attacked as the culprits. Of course, there are those who predict revolutionary advances in medicine which will radically extend life and health in the near future, and perhaps even eliminate death, but there has been little in the way of tangible results to support such promises.Because of these trends, where global population nearly quadrupled in the last century, it may actually crest and start to drop by the middle of this one. Of course, none of this is to dismiss claims that the world faces serious population stresses, or to argue that even slower population growth would not be desirable. According to the Worldwatch Institute, the world economy was already consuming the resources of 1.2 Earths by 1999, a figure that had risen to 1.4 Earths by this year. The addition of two to three billion people in the coming decades as the drop in population growth catches up with the drop in fertility rates, as well as the struggle to give billions more of those already here a decent life, will increase it (all other things being equal). The fact that the increase will overwhelmingly occur in the poorest countries also poses important challenges.Of course, it mayseema world of nine billion people or more on a planet facing ecological degradation and resource crunches will still suffice to drive a torrent of settlers out to the rest of the solar system. However, the same economic constraints discussed above would preclude that. Even were space settlement to appear an attractive palliative under those circumstances,it seemsunlikely that a really struggling planetary economy would beup to the job of delivering demographically significant numbers of peopleto new homes in orbit and beyond and equipping them to live off the resources in space, rather than depending on Earth’s limited stock of them. In other words, the motivation would exist, but not the means, and the opposite also seems to be true: that a world economy capable of building habitable space colonies islikely to be one significantly more prosperousthan that of today, rather than poorer. For that reason, life would probably be more comfortable for most of the planet’s inhabitants rather than less, diminishing the “push” factor that has historically been so important in such movements in the past. (That this population would on the whole be older—and in that, hardly the demographic profile of a pioneering culture—should also be noted in such a consideration.) This may mean that, as writers like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil have suggested, it is not human beings, but the robotic “mind children” of humanity, that will leave the Earth to explore the universe beyond it, with the vast majority of the flesh-and-blood humans sitting out the adventure at home.
There’s no need to colonize – the Earth is sustainable
Shapiro 07 [Robert – Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist in the Chemistry Department of New York University. “Why the Moon? Human survival!”. March 19, 2007]
Physicist Stephen Hawking, and a number of others, have called for humanity to spread out to distant planetsof our Solar System. But there is no need to go so far to protect ourselves. After a few decades—centuries at worst—dust and ash will settle, radioactive materials will decay, and viruses will perish. Earth will once again become the best home for humanity in the Solar System. Return would be easiest if a safe sanctuary were nearby. In the more probable instance that only a limited disaster took place, that nearby sanctuary could also play a valuable role in restoring lost data and cultural materials, and coordinating the recovery. And of course, construction of the rescue base will be much easier if it is only days, rather than months or years, away.
Plan isn’t affordable
The plan accomplishes nothing – putting humans in that environment isn’t useful and isn’t affordable
Baum 07 [Rudy M. – editor and chief of Chemical and Engineering News. “NASA’s Bad Idea”. Feb 5, 2007 ayc]
Unfortunately, what no amount of balanced reporting can disguise is that such a mission to the moon is an egregiously bad idea. As Morrissey's sources make clear, it will cost a staggering amount of money (an amount that NASA, so far, has not bothered to calculate), deprive NASA's legitimate scientific missions of funding, and accomplish exactly what the International Space Station has accomplished, which is nothing. "Nobody is clear on what science the astronauts are going to do on the moon," Robert L. Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, told Morrissey. "To invent the project and then look for the science to justify it is not the way it should be done." There is important science to be done in space. Observing our home planet, for example, is one such activity. Unfortunately, neglect of an aging fleet of Earth-orbiting satellites is leading to a significant degradation of our ability to measure changes in Earth's climate. Diverting NASA's attention and resources to establishing a moon base will only exacerbate this problem. In introducing the idea of establishing a base on the moon, President Bush used the inspirational language of exploration and discovery. "The extended human presence on the moon will enable astronauts to develop new technologies and harness the moon's abundant resources to allow manned exploration of more challenging environments," the President said. "The experience and knowledge gained on the moon will serve as a foundation for human missions beyond the moon, beginning with Mars." The idea that humans have to visit a place and leave footprints there for humanity to claim to have explored it is romantic rubbish that NASA's own robotic missions have thoroughly discredited. Over the past three decades, these missions have expanded human understanding of the solar system immeasurably. The Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini missions to the outer solar system have utterly transformed our view of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The Opportunity and Spirit rovers on Mars have performed beyond their designers' wildest dreams and extended human eyes, hands, and brains to explore the surface of Mars at a level of detail that is unprecedented. There is an enormous cost to designing and building spacecraft that can transport humans safely to the moon and beyond. Space will never be anything other than a brutally hostile environment.The surface of the moon is outer space with gravity. The surface of Mars is far harsher than Antarctica in the dead of the austral winter.Putting humans in these environments serves no useful purpose whatsoever other than satisfying an atavistic hubris that is no longer affordable.
No Brink To Extinction
No Brink to Extinction
Shapiro 07 [Robert – Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist in the Chemistry Department of New York University. “Why the Moon? Human survival!”. March 19, 2007]
Of course,we have been hearing predictions of Doomsday for years, and we are still here. According to geologists,the eruption of Mt. Toba in Indonesia 71,000 years ago darkened the sky for years. The event caused killed much of plant life on the planet. The famine that resulted caused a severe drop in the human population of that time. The Black Death of the 14th century killed perhaps one-third of the population of Europeandthe great flu epidemicof 1918 claimed an estimated 40 million victims. Despite these disasters, and others such as global wars, humanity has muddled through and even prospered. Why should things be differentnow?